How the Google+ Project’s lack of Google Apps support increased my unique visitors by 700%

This blog does not generate thousands of visitors each day, much because it’s quite new and I have no real aspirations of making profit on it, I’ll admit that if I do make profit I won’t complain though. I’m doing this because I like what I do on a daily basis, and this blog is a great way to record this both for me and to help other people out. When I posted the Plaxo VS Soocial article there was a noticable increase of visitors. This was due to more retweets on twitter, attention from Plaxo themselves and more Facebook sharing than I ever had before.

The other day though, a much more drastic increase of visitors took place. This post is about how an article on one of Google’s major flaws and the neglect they sometimes show their Google Apps customers, paying or non-paying, increased my unique visitors with nearly 700%, atleast for a day. Read on…

It all started with the +1 button. For those of you who managed to miss all the fuzz about the +1 button, just think of it as a Facebook like-button for your Google search results. Here’s a clip explaining it:

17th of June: Erik Rudling (me! ;)) installs the plugin on his wordpress based blog, erikrudling.com. He quickly realizes he can’t use the +1 feature himself after shamelessly trying to start a positive +1 trend on his own site. It is not working because he is using Google Apps.

After initial review I am quite impressed with the look and feel of Google+ and I really do think that they are on to something here. To me it seems like their most promizing attempt to enter the social segment yet especially looking back on failed attempts with services like Buzz or the cancelled Google Wave. Now it is important for them to not only show what they can do, but how to get people to use it and make available and accessible to everyone.

Which brings me to this one thing…

Google+ currently does NOT work for those of you with Google Apps, something that all of a sudden became painfully apparent in my visitor statistics from Google Analytics. They went from:

Looking like this...

...to this.

Why? Well it seems like hundreds of disappointed Google Apps users found my previous article on Google +1 not working with Google Apps accounts. Something that is also clearly visualized in the search phrases that brought most of these unhappy Googlers to this very website:

google profiles is not available for your organization.

Another one? Sure, by all means:

oops… you need a google profile to use this feature.

Will I ever be able to use Google Apps with +1 and the Google+ Project?

There are some positive indications. In the article that led to all this I got some really good comments, one especially, from gehremee who pointed me in the direction of a thread on Google’s support forum where disgruntled Google Apps users gather round the fire and share stories of disappointment. He also mentions this Google group where we recently saw a glimmer of hope in the shape and form of John Costigan from Google who states that:

We’re actively working on making Profiles (and Google+) available for Google Apps – it should be available in the coming months.

Even though that glimmer is slightly dimmed when another user replies with:

Empty promises like these are one of the factors that can make me look around for a better service provider.

The reason I don’t leave is because Google Apps makes my daily work routines alot easier to maintain. When new services like the ones mentioned above launch and leave me hanging I do feel frustrated. I like being one of the first to try the new shiny products that Google launches but the features I have in Google Apps are still more important to me. Worth mentioning is that I also have a “regular” Google account with a profile attached to it, which makes it easier to try out the new stuff not accessible from my Google Apps account.

If Google were listening in on this I would recommend them to stop making promises they can’t keep, be clear in your public announcements about compatibility issues and start paying more attention to the people that pay their salaries (that’s us). Ignorance can be dangerous in the long run, no matter how big your company is.

Thanks for tuning in and I am looking forward to your comments and to be honest, if Google fixed the Google Apps incompatibilites I guess I wouldn’t get this traffic, oh the irony. 😉